How did nazis identify who was Jewish or not?

by usagi_whispers

~English is not my first language, so there may be many grammar mistakes in my text, sorry about that ~ Ok, before I ask my questions, I will make some assumptions here, but as I am not absolutely sure about them, please correct me if I'm wrong. So, we know that Jews lived in Germany long before the Holocaust, right? [ not the most reliable of sources, but: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany ] That said, we can assume that there must have been some racial mixing between the Jewish people and the Aryan people. With this, we can also assume that many of the Jewish families had Aryan ancestry, isn't so? Also, there was the possibility of simply adopting Jewish religion without having to marry a Jew guy, isn't it? If I'm right in assuming all this, by the time holocaust happened, Jew were not an ethnicity anymore, at least not in Germany. I can give the example of several Jewish friends I have here in my country: the ones who came fleeing the war, are blond/redhead blue eyed person, and they usually have Germans lastnames. So, how did exactly the Nazis separeted who was "pure blood" aryan and who was not? And was the aryan families, that just adopted the religion, sent to the gas chambers as well? Thanks!

OldWorldGlory

You might be interested in some previous threads on how Nazi Germany located Jewish people throughout Europe and also their policies towards "Aryan" Jewish people and Jewish converts:

Identifying Jewish People

"Aryan" Jews and Converts

EDIT: Added a section on "Aryan" jews and converts.